undocumented immigrant

SACRAMENTO — Though raging thousands of miles to the east, the entrenched stalemate in Washington over federal spending and the ensuing government shutdown has thrust California’s expansive healthcare policies into the center of the pitched, partisan debate.

The Trump administration and the Republican leaders in Congress continue to use California, and the benefits the state has extended to eligible immigrants regardless of their legal status, as a cudgel against Democrats trying to extend federal subsidies for taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage.

President Trump claimed recently that Democrats “want to have illegal aliens come into our country and get massive healthcare at the cost to everybody else.” Democrats called Trump’s assertion an absolute lie, accusing Republicans of wanting to slash federal healthcare benefits to Americans in need to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy.

“California has led the nation in expanding access to affordable healthcare, but Donald Trump is ripping it away,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

In return for their votes to reopen the government, Democratic leaders in Congress want to reverse Medicaid cuts made in Republicans’ tax and spending bill passed this summer and continue subsidies through the Affordable Care Act, a program long targeted by Republicans. The subsidies, which come in the form of a tax credit, help lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

Can immigrants in the country illegally enroll in federal healthcare programs?

No. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicare, or coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to KFF, an independent health research organization.

Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-South San Francisco) held a virtual town hall last week in which he highlighted the “misinformation” about immigrants and healthcare.

“I just want to be completely clear that federal funding does not pay for health insurance for undocumented immigrants, period,” Mullin said.

Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, said the debate is really over “who can benefit from the federal dollars that are flowing to all states, including California,” to help lower costs for health insurance.

Covered California serves as a marketplace exchange for state residents seeking healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, allowing them to select from name-brand insurance providers and choose from a variety of coverage plans. The vast majority of Californians receive federal subsidies to lower their premiums, including many middle-income families who had become eligible when Congress expanded the financial assistance in 2021.

Those expanded subsidies will expire at the end of the year, and Democrats are demanding that they be extended as part of any deal to reopen the government before they vote in favor of what is known as a continuing resolution, or a temporary funding bill to keep the federal government running.

“From the very beginning, undocumented or illegal — whatever terminology you want to use — individuals were never eligible for those tax credits, never eligible for those cost-sharing reductions, and in fact, and not even eligible to come onto a marketplace and buy coverage if they paid the full costs,” Altman said.

California does offer state healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants

Through Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program, some medical coverage is offered, regardless of immigration status. The majority of that money comes from the state.

H.D. Palmer, deputy director for external affairs at the California Department of Finance, said the cost to provide Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants in the current fiscal year is just over $12.5 billion.

State money accounts for $11.2 billion and the remaining difference is reimbursed with federal funding because it’s used to cover emergency services, Palmer explained.

“Under current law, hospitals that receive Medicaid are required to provide emergency care, including labor and delivery, to individuals regardless of their citizenship status,” he said. “That goes back to a budget law that was approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan.”

The 1986 law is called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, and allows for emergency healthcare for all persons.

Some Republicans have raised other concerns about the state’s use of managed care organization taxes.

The MCO tax is a federally allowable Medicaid funding mechanism that imposes a tax on health insurance providers that charge fixed monthly payments for services and is based on the number of people enrolled in plans each month. The revenue from the tax can then be used to support Medicaid expenditures with federal matching funds.

Critics say California exploits a so-called loophole: By increasing the MCO tax, and subsequently bringing in more matching federal funds, California can then put more of its own state money toward healthcare for undocumented immigrants.

“We are bringing in all those additional federal dollars and then reallocating other money away so that we can provide about $9.6 billion for Medi-Cal for undocumented and illegal immigrants,” said Assemblymember David J. Tangipa (R-Fresno). “The MCO tax was never supposed to be weaponized in that process.”

White House officials also contend that California could not afford to put resources toward benefits for undocumented immigrants if it had not received the extra federal money — a claim Newsom disputes.

“What the president is saying, he’s lying,” Newsom said at a recent event. “Speaker [Mike] Johnson’s lying. They’re lying to the American people. It’s shameful. … I guess they’re trying to connect their displeasure with what California and many other states do with state resources in this space, and that is a very separate conversation.”

California is not alone in offering such healthcare to immigrants in the country illegally

A “small but growing” number of states offer state-funded coverage to certain groups of low-income people regardless of immigration status, according to KFF.

California became the first state in the nation last year to offer healthcare to all low-income undocumented immigrants, an expansion spearheaded by Newsom.

Newsom has since partially walked back that policy after the costs exceeded expectations. Starting in January, most adult Medi-Cal applications will be blocked — although current enrollees can continue to renew — and some adults will be required to pay monthly premiums. Undocumented minors under age 19, who became eligible for Medi-Cal nearly a decade ago, will not be affected by the changes.

The upcoming changes to the state’s policies and the enrollment freeze will help decrease the overall costs, which are projected to fall to about $10.1 billion during the next fiscal year, according to the California Department of Finance.

While the governor’s shift angered his most progressive allies and renewed speculation that he is tacking to the political middle ahead of his expected run for president in 2028, the Democratic-led Legislature approved the Medi-Cal eligibility changes in June.

Public opinion on the issue may also be changing.

Fifty-eight percent of adults in California were opposed to providing healthcare for undocumented immigrants, according to a poll released in June from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. This was a notable shift, as previous surveys from the institute conducted between 2015 to 2023 showed the majority approved.

Who would lose coverage if the tax credits end and Medicaid cuts aren’t reversed?

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Republicans this summer, ends healthcare subsidies that were extended during the pandemic and makes other cuts to programs. According to the White House, the bill “contains the most important America First healthcare reforms ever enacted.”

“The policies represent a comprehensive effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse to strengthen the healthcare system for the most vulnerable Americans, ensuring that taxpayer dollars are focused on American citizens and do not subsidize healthcare for illegal immigrants,” the White House said in a statement on Oct. 1.

Among other things, the law limits Medicare and other program eligibility to certain groups, including green card holders, effective July 2025. Other lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and asylees, are no longer eligible, according to KFF.

It’s estimated that the eligibility restrictions will result in about 1.4 million lawfully present immigrants becoming uninsured, reduce federal spending by about $131 billion and increase federal revenue by $4.8 billion as of 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, a broader group of lawfully present immigrants, including refugees, will lose access to subsidized coverage through the ACA marketplace by January 2027.

Covered California’s Altman estimated that there are about 119,000 immigrants in California who are covered and would lose eligibility for financial assistance.

More broadly, Altman and other healthcare experts predict that healthcare premiums will skyrocket if the ACA tax credits expire.

Of all the finger-pointing and recriminations that come with the current federal government shutdown, one of the most striking elements is that the Trump administration blames it on Democratic support for granting taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage to undocumented immigrants. The White House has called out California specifically, saying the state exploits a legal “loophole” to pay for that coverage with federal dollars, and other states have followed suit.

“California utilized an egregious loophole — since employed by several other states — to draw down federal matching funds used to provide Medicaid benefits for illegal immigrants,” the White House said in a policy memo released Wednesday as a budget stalemate forced a shutdown of the U.S. government.

The administration said that the Working Families Tax Cut Act, which goes into effect in October 2026, closes the loophole by prohibiting the use of taxpayer money to provide healthcare coverage to undocumented immigrants and other noncitizens.

In the memo, the White House accused congressional Democrats of wanting to repeal those policy reforms as a condition to keep the government running.

Izzy Gardon, a spokeswoman for Gov. Gavin Newsom, said there’s nothing to the administration’s underlying assertion that California and other states have found some sort of loophole that enables them to funnel Medicaid money to noncitizens.

“This is false — CA does not do this,” Gardon said in a one-line email to the L.A. Times.

Healthcare policy experts agree. California is not exploiting a “loophole,” said Adriana Ramos-Yamamoto, a senior policy analyst at the California Budget & Policy Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that studies inequality.

“The state is making lawful, transparent budget choices to invest in health coverage with its own dollars,” Ramos-Yamamoto said in a statement to The Times. “These investments improve health outcomes, strengthen communities, and lower health care costs in the long run.”

At issue is Section 71117 of the Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which imposes nearly $1 trillion in reductions to federal Medicaid healthcare spending for low-income Americans over the next 10 years. The provision allows states “to finance the non-federal share of Medicaid spending through multiple sources, including state general funds, healthcare related taxes (or ‘provider taxes’), and local government funds,” as long as taxes on healthcare providers are imposed uniformly so as not to unfairly burden providers of Medicaid services.

The bottom line, analysts said, is the administration is citing a problem with the law that doesn’t seem to exist, at least not in California.

“The so-called California loophole references a provision in the law that ends a waiver of the uniformity requirements for provider taxes — this provision has nothing to do with using federal funds to pay for care for undocumented immigrants,” said Jennifer Tolbert, a healthcare expert at the nonprofit healthcare research, polling and news organization KFF.

“But the White House makes the claim that California uses the money they get from the provider tax to pay for care for undocumented immigrants,” Tolbert said.

Fact-checking the administration’s claim is all the more difficult because there are no official data on how states spend money collected from provider taxes, Alice Burns, another KFF analyst, added. What’s more, California is among several states that offer some level of Medicaid coverage to all immigrants regardless of status. And because California cannot be federally reimbursed for healthcare spending on people who are not in the country legally, those expenses must be covered at the state level.

The White House memo goes on to claim that if Democrats were to succeed at repealing the provisions in the Working Families Tax Act, the federal government would have to spend an additional $34.6 billion in taxpayer money “that would continue to primarily be abused by California to fund healthcare for illegal immigrants.”

This assertion also misconstrues the facts, according to KFF.

“What we do know is that the $35 billion in savings that is referenced in the White House Fact Sheet refers to the federal government’s estimated savings … resulting from states making changes to their provider tax systems,” KFF spokesperson Tammie Smith said. That is, the projected savings aren’t connected to healthcare for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

Political squabbling aside, California’s approach to medical coverage for low-income, undocumented immigrants is set to undergo a major shift thanks to provisions in the 2025-26 state budget that the Democrat-led legislature and Newsom approved in June.

Starting on Jan. 1, adults “who do not have Satisfactory Immigration Status (SIS)” will no longer be able to enroll in Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, according to the state’s Department of Health Care Services webpage. Those who already have this coverage can keep it and continue to renew their enrollment. And starting on July 1, Medi-Cal enrollees who are age 19-59, undocumented and not pregnant will have to pay a $30 monthly premium to keep their coverage.

The changes, which Newsom called for in the spring to offset a ballooning Medi-Cal budget deficit, drew criticism from some immigrant rights groups, with the California Immigrant Policy Center describing the moves as “discriminatory.”

“In light of the militarized mass immigration raids and arrests causing fear and chaos across California, we are disappointed that the governor and the leadership in the Legislature chose to adopt a state budget that makes our communities even more vulnerable,” Masih Fouladi, the center’s executive director said at the time.

Everyone in California who qualifies for Medi-Cal will still be eligible to receive emergency medical and dental care, no matter their immigration status.

U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino — the brash agent who led a phalanx of military personnel into MacArthur Park this summer — was called as a witness Wednesday in a misdemeanor assault case against a protester, who allegedly struck a federal agent.

Bovino, one of the faces of President Trump’s immigration crackdown that began in Los Angeles and is now underway in Chicago, took the stand to testify that he witnessed an assault committed by Brayan Ramos-Brito in Paramount on June 7.

Outfitted in his green Border Patrol uniform, Bovino testified that he witnessed Ramos-Brito drag his arm back and strike an agent with an open palm in the chest.

The incident occurred during a skirmish outside a federal building between federal law enforcement agents and locals frustrated by Trump’s immigration policies.

On a cross-examination, federal public defender Cuauhtemoc Ortega questioned Bovino about being the subject of a misconduct investigation a few years ago and receiving a reprimand for referring to undocumented immigrants as “scum, filth and trash.”

Bovino denied referring to undocumented immigrants that way and said he was referring to “a specific criminal illegal alien” — a Honduran national who he said had raped a child and reentered the United States and had been caught at or near the Baton Rouge Border Patrol station.

“I said that about a specific individual, not about undocumented peoples, that’s not correct,” he said.

Ortega pushed back, reading from the reprimand, which Bovino signed, stating that he was describing “illegal aliens.”

“They did not say one illegal alien,” Ortega said. “They said you describing illegal aliens, and or criminals, as scum, trash and filth is misconduct. Isn’t that correct?”

“The report states that,” Bovino said.

Ortega said that Bovino was warned if he committed any instance of misconduct again, “you could be fired.”

More than 40 people have been charged with a range of federal offenses, including assaulting officers and interfering with immigration enforcement, at either downtown protests or the scene of immigration raids throughout the region this summer, the U.S. attorney’s office in L.A. said this week.

Ramos-Brito’s case is the first to go to trial.

The case centers around a protest outside the Paramount Business Center, across the street from Home Depot.

Already tensions were high, with federal officials raiding a retail and distribution warehouse in downtown L.A. in early June, arresting dozens of workers and a top union official.

At the Paramount complex, which houses Homeland Security Investigation offices, protesters began arriving around 10 a.m on June 7. Among them was Ramos-Brito.

Several videos played in court Tuesday showed Ramos-Brito and another man cursing at Border Patrol agents and stepping inches from their faces with balled fists. At one point, Ramos-Brito approached multiple Border Patrol agents who appeared to be Latino and said “you’re a f—ing disgrace if you’re Mexican.”

Asst. U.S. Atty. Patrick Kibbe said that while many protesters were “passionately” demonstrating, Ramos-Brito crossed a line by striking U.S. Border Patrol Agent Jonathan Morales.

“There’s a constitutional right to protest peacefully. It is a crime to hit a federal officer,” Kibbe said.

Federal public defender M. Bo Griffith, however, said Ramos-Brito was the victim of an assault, not the other way around.

Both social media and body-worn camera footage played in court clearly show Morales shove Ramos-Brito first, sending him flying backward into the busy intersection of Alondra Blvd. While footage shows Morales marching back toward the agent with his fists balled, no angle clearly captures the alleged assault.

Aside from Morales, three other agents took the stand Tuesday, but none said they saw Ramos-Brito hit Morales. None of the agents who testified were outfitted with body-worn cameras that day, according to Border Patrol Asst. Chief Jorge Rivera-Navarro, who serves as chief of staff for “Operation At Large” in Los Angeles.

Some of the Border Patrol agents swarming L.A. in recent months come from stations that don’t normally wear body-worn cameras, according to Navarro. He testified that he has since issued an order that led to cameras being distributed to agents working in L.A.

The clash that led to the assault charge started when Ramos-Brito stepped to U.S. Border Patrol Agent Eduardo Mejorado, who said he repeatedly asked Ramos-Brito to move to the sidewalk as the protest was blocking traffic. Video shows Mejorado place his hand on Ramos-Brito’s shoulder twice, and the defendant swatting it away.

At that point, Morales, a 24-year veteran of the Border Patrol, said he thought he needed to step in and de-escalate the situation between his fellow agent and Ramos-Brito. He did so by shoving Ramos-Brito backward into the intersection, according to video played in court. Morales said Ramos-Brito then charged at him while cursing and threw a punch at the upper part of his chest and throat.

On cross-examination, Griffith confronted Morales and Mejorado with inconsistencies between descriptions of the event they previously gave to a Homeland Security Investigations officer and their testimony in court. It was not the first time such a discrepancy affected the case.

Federal prosecutors previously dropped charges against Jose Mojica, another protester who was arrested alongside Ramos-Brito, after video footage called into question the testimony of an immigration enforcement agent.

According to an investigation summary of Mojica’s arrest previously reviewed by The Times, Mejorado claimed a man was screaming in his face that he was going to “shoot him,” then punched him at the Paramount protest. The officer said he and other agents started chasing the man, but were “stopped by two other males,” later identified as Mojica and Ramos-Brito.

Video played in court Tuesday and previously reported by The Times shows that sequence of events did not happen. Ramos-Brito and Mojica were arrested in a dogpile of agents after Ramos-Brito allegedly struck Mojica. There was no chase.

Questioned about Mojica’s case in July, a Homeland Security spokesperson said they were unable to comment on cases “under active litigation.”

Defense attorneys said Ramos-Brito sustained multiple contusions on his face, neck and back and had cuts and scrapes on his body from being dragged across the pavement later.

According to his attorneys, Ramos-Brito’s only prior interaction with law enforcement was for driving without a license.

The case could prove to be a bellwether for other immigration protest charges filed by Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli in a region where many potential jurors have negative views of immigration enforcement, or may be immigrants themselves.

On Tuesday morning, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson had to remove 21 potential jurors from the pool, several of whom said they could not be impartial due to their views on immigration policy.

Many of the potential jurors said they were first or second generation immigrants from the Philippines, Colombia, Bulgaria, Jamaica and Canada.

“I believe that immigrants are part of this country and I’m kind of partial with the defendant,” said one man, a landscaper from Lancaster.

If the Trump administration succeeds in barring undocumented immigrants from federally funded “public benefit” programs, vulnerable children and families across California would suffer greatly, losing access to emergency shelters, vital healthcare, early education and life-saving nutritional support, according to state and local officials who filed their opposition to the changes in federal court.

The new restrictions would harm undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens — including the U.S.-born children of immigrants and people suffering from mental illness and homelessness who lack documentation — and put intense stress on the state’s emergency healthcare system, the officials said.

Head Start, which provides tens of thousands of children in the state with early education, healthcare and nutritional support, may have to shutter some of its programs if the new rules barring immigrants withstand a lawsuit filed by California and other liberal-led states, officials said.

In a declaration filed as part of that litigation, Maria Guadalupe Jaime-Milehan, deputy director of the child care and developmental division of the California Department of Social Services, wrote that the restrictions would have an immediate “chilling effect” on immigrant and mixed-status families seeking support, but also cause broader “ripple effects” — especially in rural California communities that rely on such programs as “a critical safety net” for vulnerable residents, but also as major employers.

“Children would lose educational, nutritional, and healthcare services. Parents or guardians may be forced to cut spending on other critical needs to fill the gaps, and some may even be forced out of work so they can care for their children,” Jaime-Milehan said.

Rural communities would see programs shutter, and family providers lose their jobs, she wrote.

Tony Thurmond, California’s superintendent of public instruction, warned in a declaration that the “chilling effect” from such rules could potentially drive away talented educators who disagree with such policies and decide to “seek other employment that does not discriminate against children and families.”

Thurmond and Jaime-Milehan were among dozens of officials in 20 states and the District of Columbia who submitted declarations in support of those states’ lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s new rules. Six other officials from California also submitted declarations.

The lawsuit followed announcements last month from various federal agencies — including Health and Human Services, Labor, Education and Agriculture — that funding recipients would be required to begin screening out undocumented immigrants.

The announcements followed an executive order issued by President Trump in which he said his administration would “uphold the rule of law, defend against the waste of hard-earned taxpayer resources, and protect benefits for American citizens in need, including individuals with disabilities and veterans.”

Trump’s order cited the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, commonly known as welfare reform, as barring noncitizens from participating in federally funded benefits programs, and criticized past administrations for providing exemptions to that law for certain “life or safety” programs — including those now being targeted for new restrictions.

The order mandated that federal agencies restrict access to benefits programs for undocumented immigrants, in part to “prevent taxpayer resources from acting as a magnet and fueling illegal immigration to the United States.”

California and the other states sued July 21, alleging the new restrictions target working mothers and their children in violation of federal law.

“We’re not talking about waste, fraud, and abuse, we’re talking about programs that deliver essential childcare, healthcare, nutrition, and education assistance, programs that have for decades been open to all,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said.

In addition to programs like Head Start, Bonta said the new restrictions threatened access to short-term shelters for homeless people, survivors of domestic violence and at-risk youth; emergency shelters for people during extreme weather; soup kitchens, community food banks and food support services for the elderly; and healthcare for people with mental illness and substance abuse issues.

The declarations are part of a motion asking the federal judge overseeing the case to issue a preliminary injunction barring the changes from taking effect while the litigation plays out.

Beth Neary, assistant director of HIV health services at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, wrote in her declaration that the new restrictions would impede healthcare services for an array of San Francisco residents experiencing homelessness — including undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens.

“Individuals experiencing homelessness periodically lack identity and other documents that would be needed to verify their citizenship or immigration status due to frequent moves and greater risk of theft of their belongings,” she wrote.

Colleen Chawla, chief of San Mateo County Health, wrote that her organization — the county’s “safety-net” care provider — has worked for years to build up trust in immigrant communities.

“But if our clients worry that they will not be able to qualify for the care they need, or that they or members of their family face a risk of detention or deportation if they seek care, they will stop coming,” Chawla wrote. “This will exacerbate their health conditions.”

Greta S. Hansen, chief operating officer of Santa Clara County, wrote that more than 40% of her county’s residents are foreign-born and more than 60% of the county’s children have at least one foreign-born parent — among the highest rates anywhere in the country.

The administration’s changes would threaten all of them, but also everyone else in the county, she wrote.

“The cumulative effect of patients not receiving preventive care and necessary medications would likely be a strain on Santa Clara’s emergency services, which would result in increased costs to Santa Clara and could also lead to decreased capacity for emergency care across the community,” Hansen wrote.

The Trump administration has defended the new rules, including in court.

In response to the states’ motion for preliminary injunction, attorneys for the administration argued that the rule changes are squarely in line with the 1996 welfare reform law and the rights of federal agencies to enforce it.

They wrote that the notices announcing the new rules that were sent out by federal agencies “merely recognize that the breadth of benefits available to unqualified aliens is narrower than the agencies previously interpreted,” and “restore compliance with federal law and ensure that taxpayer-funded programs intended for the American people are not diverted to subsidize unqualified aliens.”

The judge presiding over the case has yet to rule on the preliminary injunction.

Ever since federal immigration raids ramped up across California, triggering fierce protests that prompted President Trump to deploy troops to Los Angeles, the state has emerged as the symbolic battleground of the administration’s deportation campaign.

But even as arrests soared, California was not the epicenter of Trump’s anti-immigrant project.

In the first five months of Trump’s second term, California lagged behind the staunchly red states of Texas and Florida in the total arrests. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from the Deportation Data Project, Texas reported 26,341 arrests — nearly a quarter of all ICE arrests nationally — followed by 12,982 in Florida and 8,460 in California.

Even in June, when masked federal immigration agents swept through L.A., jumping out of vehicles to snatch people from bus stops, car washes and parking lots, California saw 3,391 undocumented immigrants arrested — more than Florida, but still only about half as many as Texas.

When factoring in population, California drops to 27th in the nation, with 217 arrests per million residents — about a quarter of Texas’ 864 arrests per million and less than half of a whole slew of states including Florida, Arkansas, Utah, Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and Nevada.

The data, released after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government, excludes arrests made after June 26 and lacks identifying state details in 5% of cases. Nevertheless, it provides the most detailed look yet of national ICE operations.

Immigration experts say it is not surprising that California — home to the largest number of undocumented immigrants in the nation and the birthplace of the Chicano movement — lags behind Republican states in the total number of arrests or arrests as a percentage of the population.

“The numbers are secondary to the performative politics of the moment,” said Austin Kocher, a geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement.

Part of the reason Republican-dominated states have higher arrest numbers — particularly when measured against population — is they have a longer history of working directly with ICE, and a stronger interest in collaboration. In red states from Texas to Mississippi, local law enforcement officers routinely cooperate with federal agents, either by taking on ICE duties through so-called 287(g) agreements or by identifying undocumented immigrants who are incarcerated and letting ICE into their jails and prisons.

Indeed, data show that just 7% of ICE arrests made this year in California were made through the Criminal Alien Program, an initiative that requests that local law enforcement identify undocumented immigrants in federal, state and local prisons and jails.

That’s significantly lower than the 55% of arrests in Texas and 46% in Florida made through prisons or jails. And other conservative states with smaller populations relied on the program even more heavily: 75% of ICE arrests in Alabama and 71% in Indiana took place via prisons and jails.

“State cooperation has been an important buffer in ICE arrests and ICE operations in general for years,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a Sacramento-based senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “We’ve seen that states are not only willing to cooperate with ICE, but are proactively now establishing 287(g) agreements with their local law enforcement, are naturally going to cast a wider net of enforcement in the boundaries of that state.”

While California considers only some criminal offenses, such as serious felonies, significant enough to share information with ICE; Texas and Florida are more likely to report offenses that may not be as severe, such as minor traffic infractions.

Still, even if fewer people were arrested in California than other states, it also witnessed one of the most dramatic increases in arrests in the country.

California ranked 30th in ICE arrests per million in February. By June, the state had climbed to 10th place.

ICE arrested around 8,460 immigrants across California between Jan. 20 and June 26, a 212% increase compared with the five months before Trump took office. That contrasts with a 159% increase nationally for the same period.

Much of ICE’s activity in California was hyper-focused on Greater Los Angeles: About 60% of ICE arrests in the state took place in the seven counties in and around L.A. during Trump’s first five months in office. The number of arrests in the Los Angeles area soared from 463 in January to 2,185 in June — a 372% spike, second only to New York’s 432% increase.

Even if California is not seeing the largest numbers of arrests, experts say, the dramatic increase in captures stands out from other places because of the lack of official cooperation and public hostility toward immigration agents.

“A smaller increase in a place that has very little cooperation is, in a way, more significant than seeing an increase in areas that have lots and lots of cooperation,” Kocher said.

ICE agents, Kocher said, have to work much harder to arrest immigrants in places like L.A. or California that define themselves as “sanctuary” jurisdictions and limit their cooperation with federal immigration agents.

“They really had to go out of their way,” he said.

Trump administration officials have long argued that sanctuary jurisdictions give them no choice but to round up people on the streets.

Not long after Trump won the 2024 election and the L.A. City Council voted unanimously to block any city resources from being used for immigration enforcement, incoming border enforcement advisor Tom Homan threatened an onslaught.

“If I’ve got to send twice as many officers to L.A. because we’re not getting any assistance, then that’s what we’re going to do,” Homan told Newsmax.

With limited cooperation from California jails, ICE agents went out into communities, rounding up people they suspected of being undocumented on street corners and at factories and farms.

That shift in tactics meant that immigrants with criminal convictions no longer made up the bulk of California ICE arrests. While about 66% of immigrants arrested in the first four months of the year had criminal convictions, that percentage fell to 30% in June.

The sweeping nature of the arrests drew immediate criticism as racial profiling and spawned robust community condemnation.

Some immigration experts and community activists cite the organized resistance in L.A. as another reason the numbers of ICE arrests were lower in California than in Texas and even lower than dozens of states by percentage of population.

“The reason is the resistance, organized resistance: the people who literally went to war with them in Paramount, in Compton, in Bell and Huntington Park,” said Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio Los Angeles, an independent political group that patrols neighborhoods to alert residents of immigration sweeps.

“They’ve been chased out in the different neighborhoods where we organize,” he said. “We’ve been able to mobilize the community to surround the agents when they come to kidnap people.”

In L.A., activists patrolled the streets from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week, Gochez said. They faced off with ICE agents in Home Depot parking lots and at warehouses and farms.

“We were doing everything that we could to try to keep up with the intensity of the military assault,” Gochez said. “The resistance was strong. … We’ve been able, on numerous occasions, to successfully defend the communities and drive them out of our community.”

The protests prompted Trump to deploy the National Guard and Marines in June, with the stated purpose of protecting federal buildings and personnel. But the administration’s ability to ratchet up arrests hit a roadblock on July 11. That’s when a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking immigration agents in Southern and Central California from targeting people based on race, language, vocation or location without reasonable suspicion that they are in the U.S. illegally.

That decision was upheld last week by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But on Thursday, the Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to lift the temporary ban on its patrols, arguing that it “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California by hanging the prospect of contempt over every investigative stop.”

The order led to a significant drop in arrests across Los Angeles last month. But this week, federal agents carried out a series of raids at Home Depots from Westlake to Van Nuys.

Trump administration officials have indicated that the July ruling and arrest slowdown do not signal a permanent change in tactics.

“Sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the communities and more work site enforcement,” Homan told reporters two weeks after the court blocked roving patrols. “Why is that? Because they won’t let one agent arrest one bad guy in the jail.”

U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, who has been leading operations in California, posted a fast-moving video on X that spliced L.A. Mayor Karen Bass telling reporters that “this experiment that was practiced on the city of Los Angeles failed” with video showing him grinning. Then, as a frenetic drum and bass mix kicked in, federal agents jump out of a van and chase people.

“When you’re faced with opposition to law and order, what do you do?” Bovino wrote. “Improvise, adapt, and overcome!”

Clearly, the Trump administration is willing to expend significant resources to make California a political battleground and test case, Ruiz Soto said. The question is, at what economic and political cost?

“If they really wanted to scale up and ramp up their deportations,” Ruiz Soto said, “they could go to other places, do it more more safely, more quickly and more efficiently.”

The accordionist commands the stage, his eyes staring off as if in a trance, his fingers trilling out the opening notes of a tune. It’s a long, sinuous riff, one so intoxicating that the audience in front of him can’t help but to two-step across the crowded dance floor.

He and his singing partner unfurl a sad story that seemingly clashes with the rhythms that back it. An undocumented immigrant has arrived in San Antonio from Laredo to marry his girlfriend, Chencha. But the lights on his car aren’t working and he has no driver’s license, so the cops throw him in jail. Upon being released, the song’s protagonist finds a fate worse than deportation: His beloved is now dating the white guy who issues driver’s licenses.

“Those gabachos are abusive,” the singer-accordionist sighs in Spanish in his closing line. “I lost my car, and they took away my Chencha.”

The above scene is from “Chulas Fronteras,” a 1976 documentary about life on the United States-Mexico border and the accordion-driven conjuntos that served as the soundtrack to the region. The song is “Un Mojado Sin Licencia” — “A Wetback Without a License.” The musician is Tex-Mex legend Flaco Jiménez, who died last week at 86.

Born in San Antonio, the son and grandson of accordionists became famous as the face of Tex-Mex music and as a favorite session player whenever rock and country gods needed some borderlands flair. He appeared alongside everyone from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan, Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam on “The Streets of Bakersfield” to Willie Nelson for a rousing version of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” With Doug Sahm, Augie Meyers and fellow Tejano chingón Freddy Fender, Jiménez formed the Texas Tornadoes, whose oeuvre blasts at every third-rate barbecue joint from the Texas Hill Country to Southern California.

Jiménez was a titan of American music, something his obits understood. One important thing they missed, however, was his politics.

He unleashed his Hohner accordion not just at concerts but for benefits ranging from student scholarships to the successful campaign of L.A. County Superior Court Judge David B. Finkel to Lawyers’ Committee, a nonprofit formed during the civil rights era to combat structural racism in the American legal system. Jiménez and the Texas Tornadoes performed at Bill Clinton’s 1992 inauguration ball; “Chulas Fronteras,” captured Jiménez as the headliner at a fundraiser for John Treviño Jr., who would go on to become Austin’s first Mexican American council member.

It’s a testament to Jiménez’s heart and humor that the song he performed for it was “Un Mojado Sin Licencia,” which remains one of my favorite film concert appearances, an ideal all Latino musicians should aspire to during this long deportation summer.

The title is impolite but reflected the times: Some undocumented immigrants in the 1970s wore mojado not as a slur but a badge of honor (to this day, that’s what my dad proudly calls himself even though he became a U.S. citizen decades ago). Jiménez’s mastery of the squeezebox, his fingers speeding up and down the rows of button notes for each solo like a reporter on deadline, is as complex and gripping as any Clapton or Prince guitar showcase.

What was most thrilling about Jiménez’s performance, however, was how he refused to lose himself to the pathos of illegal immigration, something too many people understandably do. “Un Mojado Sin Licencia,” which Jiménez originally recorded in 1964, is no dirge but rather a rollicking revolt against American xenophobia.

The cameraman captures his gold teeth gleaming as Jiménez grins throughout his thrilling three minutes. He’s happy because he has to be: the American government can rob Mexicans of a better life, “Un Mojado Sin Licencia” implicitly argues, but it’s truly over when they take away our joy.

“Un Mojado Sin Licencia” is in the same jaunty vein as other Mexican classics about illegal immigration such as Vicente Fernández’s “Los Mandados,” “El Corrido de Los Mojados” by Los Alegres de Terán and “El Muro” by rock en español dinosaurs El Tri. There is no pity for undocumented immigrants in any of those tracks, only pride at their resilience and glee in how la migra can never truly defeat them. In “Los Mandados,” Fernández sings of how la migra beats up an immigrant who summarily sues them; “El Corrido de Los Mojados” plainly asks Americans, “If the mojados were to disappear/Who would you depend on?”

Even more defiant is “El Muro,” which starts as an overwrought metal anthem but reveals that its hero not only came into the United States, he used the titular border wall as a toilet (trust me, it sounds far funnier in the Mexico City lingo of gravelly lead singer Alex Lora). These songs tap into the bottomless well that Mexicans have for gallows humor. And their authors knew what satirists from Charlie Chaplin to Stephen Colbert knew: When life throws tyranny at you, you have to scoff and push back.

There are great somber songs about illegal immigration, from La Santa Cecilia’s haunting bossa nova “El Hielo (ICE)” to Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” which has been recorded by everyone from the Byrds to Dolly Parton to Jiménez when he was a member of Los Super Seven. But the ones people hum are the funny ones, the ones you can polka or waltz or mosh to, the ones that pep you up. In the face of terror, you need to sway and smile to take a break from the weeping and the gnashing of teeth that’s the rest of the day.

I saw “Chulas Fronteras” as a college student fighting anti-immigrant goons in Orange County and immediately loved the film but especially “Un Mojado Sin Licencia.” Too many of my fellow travelers back then felt that to party even for a song was to betray the revolution. Thankfully, that’s not the thinking among pro-immigrant activists these days, who have incorporated music and dancing into their strategy as much as lawsuits and neighborhood patrols.

The sidewalks outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A., where hundreds of immigrants are detained in conditions better suited for a decrepit dog pound, have transformed into a makeshift concert hall that has hosted classical Arabic musicians and Los Jornaleros del Norte, the house band of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Down the 5 Freeway, the OC Rapid Response Network holds regular fundraisers in bars around downtown Santa Ana featuring everything from rockabilly quartets to female DJs spinning cumbias. While some music festivals have been canceled or postponed for fear of migra raids, others have gone on as planned lest ICE win.

Musicians like Pepe Aguilar, who dropped a treacly cover of Calibre 50’s “Corrido de Juanito” a few weeks ago, are rushing to meet the moment with benefit concerts and pledges to support nonprofits. That’s great, but I urge them to keep “Un Mojado Sin Licencia” on a loop as they’re jotting down lyrics or laying down beats. There’s enough sadness in the fight against la migra. Be like Flaco: Make us laugh. Make us dance. Keep us from slipping into the abyss. Give us hope.

Kamala Harris does not want to be governor of California, which has a whole lot of contenders (and some voters) doing a happy dance this week.

But with her announcement Wednesday that she is bowing out of a race she never officially entered, Harris has ignited a flurry of speculation that she’s warming up for another run at the White House in 2028.

Whether you like Harris or not, a possible run by the XX chromosome former vice president raises a perennial conundrum: Can a woman win the presidency?

“This question is legitimate,” Nadia E. Brown told me.

She’s a professor of government and director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She points out that post-election, Democrats can’t figure out who they are or what they stand for. In that disarray, it may seem easy and safe in 2028 to travel the well-worn route of “a straight, old white guy who fills the status quo.”

That may be especially true in the Trump era, when an increasingly vocal and empowered slice of America seems to believe that women do, in fact, belong in the kitchen making sanwhiches, far away from any decision beyond turkey or ham.

Brown points out that even Democrats who flaunt their progressive values, including how much they’d love to vote for a female president, may harbor secret sexism that comes out in the privacy of the voting booth.

Post-2024, Harris’ defeat — and deciphering what it means — has caused a lot of “morning-after anxiety and agita,” she said. “We’re all doing research, we’re all in the field trying to figure this out.”

While confused Democrats diddle in private with their feelings, Republicans have made race and gender the center of their platform, even if they cloak it under economic talk. The party’s position on race has become painfully clear with its stance that all undocumented immigrants are criminals and deserving of horrific detention in places such as “Alligator Alcatraz” or even foreign prisons known for torture.

The Republican position on women is slightly more cloaked, but no less retrograde. Whether it’s the refusal to tell the public how Trump is included in the Epstein files, the swift and brutal erosion of reproductive rights, or claims, such as the one by far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk, that the only reason for women to attend college should be to get a “Mrs.” degree, Republicans have made little secret of the fact that equality is not part of their package.

Although Trump’s approval ratings have tanked over immigration, he did win just over half of the popular vote last fall. So that’s a lot of Americans who either agree with him, or at least aren’t bothered by these pre-civil rights ideas on race and gender.

Add to that reality the eager pack of nice, safe Democratic white guys who are lining up for their own chance at the Oval Office — our current California governor included — and it does beg the question for the left: Is a woman worth the risk?

“I’ve definitely seen and heard consultants and, you know, even anxious women donors say, ‘Maybe this means we can’t run a woman.’ And I think it’s completely normal for certain elements of the party to be anxious about gender,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, a grassroots advocacy group.

She too thinks the gender question is “logical” since it has been blamed — though not by her — as “the reason we lost to Donald Trump twice in a row, right? Whereas Biden was able to beat him.”

While Timmaraju is clear that those losses can’t — and shouldn’t — be tied to gender alone, gender also can’t be ignored when the margins are thin.

Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive political organizing group Our Revolution, which backed Bernie Sanders for president in 2016, said that gender and race are always a factor, but he believes the bigger question for any candidate in 2028 will be their platform.

Harris, he said, “lost not because she was a woman. She lost because she did not embrace an economic populist message. And I think the electorate is angry about their standard of living declining, and they’re angry about the elites controlling D.C. and enriching themselves.”

Greevarghese told me he sees an opposite momentum building within the party and the electorate — a desire to not play it safe.

“Whoever it is — male, female, gay, straight, Black, white, Asian — the candidate’s got to have a critique of this moment, and it can’t be a normie Dem.”

Brown, the professor, adds, rightfully, that looking at the question of a female candidate’s chances through the lens of just Harris is too narrow. There are lots of women likely to jump into the race. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are just two names already in the mix. Brown adds that an outside contender such as a woman from a political dynasty (think Obama) or a celebrity along the lines of Trump could also make headway.

The criticisms of Harris, with her baggage of losing the election and critiques of how she handled the campaign and the media, may not dog another female candidate, especially with voters.

“Whether Kamala runs again or not, I’m optimistic that the American people will vote for a female president,” Vanessa Cardenas told me. She is the executive director of America’s Voice, an advocacy group for immigrants’ rights.

Cardenas points out that Hillary Clinton received more than 65 million votes (winning the popular vote), and Harris topped 75 million. If just Latinos had gone for Harris, instead of breaking in an ongoing rightward shift, she would have won. Cardenas thinks Latino votes could shift again in 2028.

“After the chaos, cruelty and incompetence of the Trump presidency, Latino voters, like most Americans, will reward candidates who can speak most authentically and seem most ready to fight for an alternative vision of America,” she said. “I believe women, and women of color, can credibility and forcibly speak to the need for change rooted in the lived experiences of their communities.”

Timmaraju said that regardless of what Harris decides, Democrats will probably have one of the most robust primaries in recent times — which can only be good for the party and for voters.

And rather than asking, “Can a woman win?” the better question would be, “Do we really want a system that won’t let them try?”

He inveighs against illegal immigration in terms more appropriate for a vermin infestation. He wants all people without papers deported immediately, damn the cost. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the United States is an act of insurrection. He uses the internet mostly to share crude videos and photos depicting Latinos as subhuman.

Stephen Miller? Absolutely.

But every time I hear the chief architect of Donald Trump’s scorched earth immigration policies rail in uglier and uglier terms, I recall another xenophobe I hadn’t thought of in awhile.

For nearly 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought illegal immigration in Los Angeles and beyond with a singular obsession. The former Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his campaign, he told The Times in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting during the 1992 L.A. riots and thinking, “Oh, my God, there are so many of them and they are so out of control.”

Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive that a federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer before that became commonplace, Spencer hosted a local radio show, produced videos that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an “invasion” and turned his vitriolic newsletter into a website, American Patrol, that helped connect nativist groups across the country.

American Patrol’s home page was a collection of links to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have committed crimes. While Spencer regularly trashed Muslims and other immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans.

A “Family Values” button on the website, in the colors of the Mexican flag, highlighted sex crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a hole in California with the caption “Sink-hole de Mayo.”

Long before conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked physical fights at protests and published reams of digital nonsense against Latino politicians, once superimposing a giant sombrero on an image of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, “Viva Mexico!”

On the morning Villaraigosa, the future L.A. mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the assembly in 1998, every seat in the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and leader of the supposed Mexican takeover of California.

“I don’t remember if his name was on it, but it was all his terminology,” said Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his college membership in the Chicano student group MEChA an issue in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. “But he never had the balls to talk to me in person.”

Spencer became the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing movement, lecturing to groups of middle-aged gringos about his work — first across the San Fernando Valley, then in small towns where Latinos were migrating in large numbers for the first time.

“California [it] has often been said is America’s future. Let me tell you about your future,” he told the Council of Conservative Citizens in Virginia in 1999.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks with the media outside the White House in Washington, DC, on May 9, 2025.

(Saul Loeb/ AFP via Getty Images)

Spencer is the person most responsible for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko idea that Mexicans came to the U.S. not for economic reasons but because of a plot concocted by the Mexican government to take back the lands lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War. He wrote screeds like “Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?” and threatened libel lawsuits against anyone — myself included — who dared point out that he was a racist.

He was a favorite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Times wrote in 2001 that Spencer “foresaw millions of converts” to his anti-immigrant campaign, “only to see his temple founder.”

Moving to southern Arizona in 2002, the better to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, Spencer spent the rest of his life trying to sell state and federal authorities on border-monitoring technology he developed that involved planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His move inspired other conservatives to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border on their own.

By the Obama era, he was isolated even from other anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that every person who came to this country illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn’t bring Spencer and his work back into the limelight.

He was so forgotten that I didn’t even realize he was dead until Googling his name recently, after enduring another Miller rant. Spencer’s hometown Sierra Vista’s Herald Review was the only publication I found that made any note of his death from cancer in 2022 at age 85, describing his life’s work as bringing “the crisis of illegal immigration to the forefront of the American public’s consciousness.”

That’s a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer’s picket fence.

We live in Glenn Spencer’s world, a place where the nastier the rhetoric against illegal immigration and the crueler the government’s efforts against all migrants, the better. Every time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading force, every time someone posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws another tantrum on Fox News, Glenn Spencer gets his evil wings.

Spencer “stood out among a vile swamp of racists and crackpots like a tornado supercell on radar,” said Brian Levin, chair of the California Civil Rights Department’s Commission on the State of Hate and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, who monitored American Patrol for years. “What’s frightening now is that hate like his used to be well-segregated from the mainstream. Now, the guardrails are off, and what Spencer advocated for is federal policy.”

I first found out about Spencer in 1999 as a student activist at Chapman University. Spencer applauded the Anaheim Union High School District’s decision to sue Mexico for the cost of educating undocumented immigrants’ children, describing those of us who opposed it as communists — when he was being nice. His American Patrol described MEChA, which I, like Villaraigosa, belonged to, as a “scourge” and a “sickness.”

His website was disgusting, but it became a must-read of mine. I knew even then that ignoring hate allows it to fester, and I wanted to figure out why people like Spencer despised people like me, my family and my friends. So I regularly covered him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists said my work was a waste of time — that people like Spencer were wheezing artifacts who would eventually disappear as the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants.

And here we are.

Spencer usually sent me legal threats whenever I wrote about his ugly ways — threats that went nowhere. That’s why I was surprised at how relatively polite he was the last time we communicated, in 2019.

I reached out via email asking for an interview for a Times podcast I hosted about the 25th anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was openly criticizing Trump’s planned border wall, which he found a waste of money and not nearly as efficient as his own system. Spencer initially said he would consider my request, while sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187’s demise on then-California Gov. Gray Davis and Mexico’s president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo.

When I followed up a few months later, Spencer bragged about the legacy of his website, which he hadn’t regularly updated since 2013 due to declining health. The American Patrol archives “would convince the casual observer that The Times did what it could do [to] defeat my efforts and advance the cause of illegal immigration,” Spencer wrote. “Do I think The Times has changed its spots? No. Will I agree to an interview? No.”

Levin hadn’t heard about Spencer’s death until we talked.

“I thought he went into irrelevance,” he admitted with a chuckle that he quickly cut off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer’s legacy in the era of Trump.

“We ignored that cough, that speck in the X-ray,” Levin concluded, now somber. “And now, we have cancer.”

The Pew Research Center is one of the most trusted polling firms in the country, especially when it comes to Latinos. Last week, it published findings that should have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tortuous relationship with America’s largest minority.

According to Pew, Trump won 48% of Latino voters in the 2024 presidential election — the highest percentage ever recorded by a Republican presidential nominee and a 12 percentage point improvement from his 2020 showing.

Latinos made up 10% of Trump’s coalition, up from 7% four years ago. Latino men went with a Republican for the first time. Trump even improved his share of support among Latinas — long seen by Democratic leaders as a bulwark against their macho Trumpster relatives — by a 13-point margin, a swing even greater than that of Latino men.

These stats prove what I’ve been warning about for years: that Latinos were souring on illegal immigration — even in blue California — and tiring of a Democratic Party too focused on policies that weren’t improving their lives. This gave Trump a chance to win over Latino voters, despite his years-long bloviations against Mexico and Central American nations, because Latinos — who assimilate like any other immigrants, if not more so — were done with the Democratic status quo. They were willing to take a risk on an erratic strongman resembling those from their ancestral lands.

Pew’s findings confirm one of Trump’s most remarkable accomplishments — one so unlikely that professional Latinos long dismissed his election gains as exaggerations. Those voters could have been the winds blowing the xenophobic sails of his deportation fleet right now.

All Trump had to do was stick to his campaign promises and target the millions of immigrants who came in illegally during the Biden years. Pick off newcomers in areas of the country where Latinos remain a sizable minority and don’t have a tradition of organizing. Dare Democrats and immigrant rights activists to defend the child molesters, drug dealers and murderers Trump vowed to prioritize in his roundups. Conduct raids like a slow boil through 2026, to build on the record-breaking number of Latino GOP legislators in California and beyond.

Trump has done none of that. He instead decided to smash his immigration hammer on Los Angeles, the Latino capital of the U.S.

Instead of going after the worst of the worst, la migra has nabbed citizens and noncitizens alike. A Times analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law found that nearly 70% of those arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from June 1 through June 10 had no criminal convictions.

Instead of harassing newcomers with few ties to the U.S., agents are sweeping up migrants who have been here for decades. Instead of doing operations that drew little attention, as happened under Presidents Obama and Biden — and even during Trump’s first term — masked men have thrown around their power like secret police in a third-rate dictatorship while their bosses crow about it on social media. Instead of treating people with some dignity and allowing them a chance to contest their deportations, the Trump administration has stuffed them into detention facilities like tinned fish and treated the Constitution like a suggestion instead of the law of the land.

The cruelty has always been the point for Trump. But he risks making the same mistake that California Republicans made in the 1980s and 1990s: taking a political win they earned with Latinos and turning it into trash.

Fullerton College student David Rojas calls on Fullerton High students across street to join a protest against Proposition 187 on Nov. 3, 1994. The ballot initiative sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants but instead changed California politics.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the last amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, who famously said that Latinos were Republicans who didn’t know it yet. The Great Communicator knew that the best way to bring them into the GOP was to push meat-and-potato issues while not demonizing them.

The 1986 amnesty could have been a moment for Republicans to win over Latinos during the so-called Decade of the Hispanic. Instead, California politicians began to push for xenophobic bans, including on store signs in other languages and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, arguing that these supposed invaders were destroying the Golden State. This movement culminated in the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was eventually declared unconstitutional.

We all know how that worked out.

My generation of Mexican Americans — well on our way to assimilation, feeling little in common with the undocumented immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America who arrived after our parents — instead became radicalized. We waved the Mexican flag with pride, finding no need to brandish the Stars and Stripes that we kept in our hearts. We helped Democrats establish a supermajority in California and tossed Republicans into the political equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I covered anti-ICE protests in June outside a federal building in Santa Ana, it felt like the Proposition 187 years all over again. The Mexican tricolor flew again, this time joined by the flags of El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. The majority of protesters were teens and young adults with no ties to the immigrant rights groups I know — they will be the next generation of activists.

I also met folks such as Giovanni Lopez. For a good hour, the 38-year-old Santa Ana resident, wearing a white poncho depicting the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, blew a loud plastic horn as if he were Joshua trying to knock down the walls of Jericho. It was his first protest.

“I’m all for them deporting the criminals,” Lopez said during a short break. “But that’s not what they’re doing…. They’re getting regular people, and that’s not right. You gotta stand up for regular raza.”

Since then, I’ve seen my social media feeds transform into a barrio CNN, as people share videos of la migra grabbing people and onlookers unafraid to tell them off. Other reels feature customers buying out street vendors for the day so they can remain safely at home. The transformation has even hit home: My dad and brother went to a “No Kings” rally in Anaheim a few weeks ago — without telling each other, or me, beforehand.

When rancho libertarians like them are angry enough to publicly fight back, you know the president is blowing it with Latinos.

People gather on Sunset Boulevard and Vin Scully Avenue to protest against immigration raids in Los Angeles as well as the Dodgers on June 21, 2025.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Back to Pew. Another report released last month found that nearly half of Latinos are worried that someone they know might get deported. The fear is real, even among Latino Republicans, with just 31% approving of Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants, compared with 61% of white Republicans.

California Assemblymember Suzette Martinez Valladares and state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh are among those GOP skeptics. They signed a letter to Trump from California Republican legislators asking that his migra squads focus on actual bad hombres and “when possible, avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.”

When proud conservatives like Ochoa Bogh and Valladares, who is co-chair of the California Hispanic Legislative Caucus, are disturbed by Trump’s deportation deluge, you know the president’s blowing it with Latinos.

Yet Trump is still at it. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was suing the L.A. City Council and Mayor Karen Bass, arguing that their “sanctuary” city policy was thwarting “the will of the American people regarding deportations.”

By picking on the City of Angels, Trump is letting us set an example for everyone else — because no one gets down for immigrant rights like L.A., or creates Latino political power like we do. When mass raids pop up elsewhere, communities will be ready.

Many Latinos voted for Trump because they felt that Democrats forgot them. Now that Trump is paying attention to us, more and more of us are realizing that his intentions were never good — and carrying our passports because you just never know.

You blew it, Donald — but what else is new?

This will strike the literal-minded as illogical, but I think Huntington Park Mayor Arturo Flores, a Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, had a righteous point when he declared at a news conference with Southern California mayors that immigrants being rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in communities like his “are Americans, whether they have a document or they don’t.”

“The president keeps talking about a foreign invasion,” Flores told me Thursday. “He keeps trying to paint us as the other. I say, ‘No, you are dealing with Americans.’”

California’s estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who have lived among us for years, for decades, who work and pay taxes here, who have sent their American-born children to schools here, have all the responsibilities of citizens minus many of the rights. Yes, technically, they have broken the law. (For that matter, so has President Trump, a felon, and he continues to violate the Constitution day after day, as his mounting court losses attest.)

But our region’s undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants are inextricably embedded in our lives. They care for our children, build our homes, dig our ditches, trim our trees, clean our homes, hotels and businesses, wash our dishes, pick our crops, sew our clothes. Lots own small businesses, are paying mortgages, attend universities, rise in their professions. In 2013, I wrote about Sergio Garcia, the first undocumented immigrant admitted to the California Bar. Since then, he has become a U.S. citizen and owns a personal injury law firm.

These Californians are far less likely to break the law than native-born Americans, and they do not deserve the reign of terror being inflicted on them by the Trump administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has pointlessly but theatrically called in the Marines.

“So we started off by hearing the administration wanted to go after violent felons gang members, drug dealers,” said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who organized the mayors’ news conference last week, “but when you raid Home Depot and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart, and when you run armored caravans through our streets, you’re not trying to keep anyone safe. You’re trying to cause fear and panic.”

And please, let’s not forget that when Congress came together and hammered out a bipartisan immigration reform bill under President Biden, Trump demanded Republicans kill it because he did not want a rational policy, he wanted to be able to keep hammering Democrats on the issue.

But it seems there is more going on here than rounding up undocumented immigrants and terrorizing their families. We seem to have entered the “punish California” phase of Trump 2.0.

“Trump has a hyperfocus on California, on how to hurt the economy and cause chaos, and he is really doubling down on that campaign,” Flores told me. He has a point.

“We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor placed on this country,” Noem told reporters Thursday at a news conference in the Westwood federal building, during which California Sen. Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed face down for daring to ask her a question. “We are not going away.”

So now we’re talking about regime change? (As former Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe put it on Bluesky, the use of military force aimed at displacing democratically elected leaders “is the very definition of a coup.”)

Noem’s noxious mix of willful ignorance and inflammatory rhetoric is almost too ludicrous to mock. It goes hand in hand with Trump’s silly declaration that our city has been set aflame by rioters, that without the military patrolling our streets, Los Angeles “would be a crime scene like we haven’t seen in years,” and that “paid insurrectionists” have fueled the anti-ICE protests.

What we are seeing play out in the news and in our neighborhoods is the willful infliction of fear, trauma and intimidation designed to spark a violent response, and the warping of reality to soften the ground for further Trump administration incursions into blue states, America’s bulwark against his autocratic aspirations.

For weeks, Trump has been scheming to deprive California — probably illegally — of federal funding for public schools and universities, citing resistance to his executive orders on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, on immigration, on environmental regulations, etc.

And yet, because he is perhaps the world’s most ignorant head of state, he seems to have suddenly realized that crippling the California economy might be bad politics for him. On Thursday, he suggested in his own jumbled way that perhaps deporting thousands of the state’s farm and hospitality workers might cause pain to his friends, their employers. (Central Valley growers and agribusiness PACs, for example, overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024.)

“Our farmers are being hurt badly by, you know, they have very good workers. They’ve worked for them for 20 years,” Trump said. “They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be, you know, great. And we’re going to have to do something about that.”

Like a lot of Californians, I feel helpless in the face of this assault on immigrants.

I thought about a Guatemalan, a father of three young American-born children, who has a thriving business hauling junk. I met him a couple of years ago at my local Home Depot, and have hired him a few times to haul away household detritus. Once, after I couldn’t get the city to help, he hauled off a small dune’s worth of sand at the end of my street that had become the local dogs’ pee pad.

I called him this week — I have more stuff that I need to get rid of, and I was pretty sure he could use the work. Early Friday morning, he arrived on time with two workers. He said hadn’t been able to work in two weeks but was hopeful he’d be able to return to Home Depot soon.

“How are your kids doing?” I asked.

“They worry,” he said. “They ask, ‘What will we do if you’re deported?’”

He tells them not to fret, that things will soon be back to normal. After he drove off, he texted: “Thank you so much for helping me today. God bless you.”

No, God bless him. For working hard. For being a good dad. And for still believing, against the odds, in the American dream.

@rabcarian.bsky.social @rabcarian

She was attending her first protest, driven to be seen with thousands of others at a “No Kings” demonstration Saturday morning in El Segundo, eager to make a statement.

But she was there for her father, as well.

The sign she held aloft as car horns honked in support said: “I’m speaking for those who can’t.”

Her father would have loved to join her, Jennifer told me. But with ICE raids in Los Angeles and arrests by the hundreds in recent days, her 55-year-old undocumented dad couldn’t afford to take the risk.

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

Jennifer is 29. I hadn’t seen her in nearly 20 years, when I wrote about her father and visited her home in Inglewood to deliver $2,000 donated by readers who read his story.

Here’s the back story:

In December of 2005 I got a tip about a shooting in the front yard of an Inglewood home. Two men approached a landscaper and demanded money. He resisted, and in the tussle that ensued, a shot was fired.

Paramedics rushed the man to the emergency room at UCLA, where doctors determined that a bullet had just missed his heart and was lodged in his chest. Although doctors recommended he stay at least overnight for observation, he insisted he felt fine and needed to get back to work.

The landscaper, whom I referred to as Ray, insisted on leaving immediately. As he later explained to me, the Inglewood job was for a client who hired him to re-landscape the yard as a Christmas gift to his wife.

Ray was shot on Dec. 23.

Demonstrators at a “No Kings” event at Main Street and Imperial Highway in El Segundo on Saturday.

(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)

He finished the job by Christmas.

I’ve been thinking about Ray since ICE agents began the crackdown ordered by President Trump, whose administration said its goal was to deport 3,000 people a day. Hundreds have been arrested in the Fashion District, at car washes and at building supply stores across Los Angeles.

That’s led to clashes between law enforcement and demonstrators, and to peaceful protests like the one along Imperial Highway and Main Street on Saturday in El Segundo.

I thought of Ray because Trump generally speaks of undocumented immigrants as monsters, and no doubt there are criminals among them.

But over the years, nearly all my encounters have been with the likes of Ray, who are an essential part of the workforce.

Yes, there are costs associated with undocumented immigrants, but benefits as well — they’ve been an essential part of the California economy for years. And among those eager to hire them — in the fields, in the hospitality industry, in slaughterhouses, in healthcare — are avid Trump supporters.

On Friday, I called Ray to see how he was doing.

“I’m worried about it,” he said, even though he has some protection.

Demonstrators at the “No Kings” event in El Segundo raise their signs, including one that read, “Real men don’t need parades.”

(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)

Several years ago, an immigration attorney helped him get a permit to work, but the Trump administration has vowed to end temporary protected legal status for certain groups of immigrants.

“I see and hear about a lot of cases where they’re not respecting documents. People look Latino, and they get arrested,” said Ray, who is in the midst of a years-long process to upgrade his status.

Ray is still loading tools onto his truck and driving to landscaping, tree-trimming and irrigation jobs across L.A., as he’s done for more than 30 years. But he said he’s being extra careful.

A protester at a “No Kings” event in El Segundo prepares a sign on Saturday.

(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)

“You know, like keeping an eye out everywhere and checking my telephone to see where checkpoints are,” he said.

Ray’s ex-wife has legal status, and all three of their children were born here and are U.S. citizens. The marriage ended and Ray has remarried, but he remains close to the three kids I met in the spring of 2006, when they were 9, 10 and 11.

The younger son, who is disabled, lives with Ray. His older son, a graphic designer, lives nearby. Jennifer, a job recruiter, lives next door and has been on edge in recent days.

“Even though he has permission to be here … it’s scary, and I wasn’t even letting him go to work,” Jennifer said. “On Monday I was getting into the shower and heard him loading up the truck.”

She ran outside to stop him, but he was already gone, so she called him and said, “Oh my God, you shouldn’t be going to work right now. It’s not safe.”

“No Kings” was the theme of the day during a demonstration in El Segundo on Saturday.

(Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times)

Jennifer works from home but couldn’t concentrate that day. She used an app to track her father’s location and checked the latest information on ICE raids. So far, Ray has made it home safely each day, although Jennifer is hoping he slows down for a while.

Twenty years ago, when I wrote about Ray getting shot and his insistence on going back to work immediately, one of the readers who donated money — $1,000 — to him was one of his landscaping clients, Rohelle Erde. When I checked in with her this week to update her on Ray’s situation, she said her entire family came to the U.S. as immigrants to work hard and build a better life, and Ray did the same.

“He has been working and making money and helping people beautify their homes, creating beauty and order, and this must be so distressing,” Erde said. “The ugliness and disorder are exactly the opposite of what he represents.”

The evening before Saturday’s rally in El Segundo, Jennifer told me why she wanted to demonstrate:

“To show my face for those who can’t speak and to say we’re not all criminals, we’re all sticking together, we have each other’s backs,” she said. “The girl who takes care of my kids is undocumented and she’s scared to leave the house. I have a lot of friends and family in the same boat.”

Jennifer attended with her son, who’s 9 and told me he’s afraid his grandfather will be arrested and sent back to Mexico.

“He’s the age I was when you met me,” Jennifer said of her son.

She took in the crowd and said it was uplifting to see such a huge and diverse throng of people stand up, in peaceful protest, against authoritarianism and the militarization of the country.

Mother and son stood together, flashing their signs for passing motorists.

His said, “Families belong together.”

Jennifer told me that her father still has the bullet in his chest.

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I was driving while listening to the news Sunday when I heard House Speaker Mike Johnson justify President Trump’s move to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles.

“We have to maintain the rule of law,” Johnson said.

I almost swerved off the road.

Maintain the rule of law?

Steve Lopez

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.

Trump pardoned the hooligans who ransacked the Capitol because he lost the 2020 presidential election. They clashed with police, destroyed property and threatened the lives of public officials, and to Trump, they’re heroes.

Maintain the rule of law?

Trump is a 34-count felon who has defied judicial rulings, ignored laws that don’t serve his interests, and turned his current presidency into an unprecedented adventure in self-dealing and graft.

And now he’s sending an invading army to Los Angeles, creating a crisis where there was none. Arresting undocumented immigrants with criminal records is one thing, but is that what this is about? Or is it about putting on a show, occupying commercial and residential neighborhoods and arresting people who are looking for — or on their way to — work.

Protesters and members of the National Guard watched one another in front of the federal building in Los Angeles on Monday.

(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that U.S. Marines were on high alert and ready to roll, and in the latest of who knows how many escalations, hundreds are headed our way.

What next, the Air Force?

I’m not going to defend the vandalism and violence — which plays into Trump’s hands—that followed ICE arrests in Los Angeles. I can see him sitting in front of the tube, letting out a cheer every time another “migrant criminal” flings a rock or a scooter at a patrol car.

But I am going to defend Los Angeles and the way things work here.

For starters, undocumented immigration is not the threat to public safety or the economy that Trump like to bloviate about.

It’s just that he knows he can score points on border bluster and on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), so he’s going full gasbag on both, and now he’s threatening to lock up Gov. Gavin Newsom.

To hear the rhetoric, you’d think every other undocumented immigrant is a gang member and that trans athletes will soon dominate youth sports if someone doesn’t stand up to them.

I can already read the mail that hasn’t yet arrived, so let me say in advance that I do indeed understand that breaking immigration law means breaking the law, and I believe that President Biden didn’t do enough to control the border, although it was Republicans who killed a border security bill early last year.

I also acknowledge the cost of supporting undocumented immigrants is substantial when you factor in public education and, in California, medical care, which is running billions of dollars beyond original estimates.

But the economic contributions of immigrants — regardless of legal status — are undeniably numerous, affecting the price we pay for everything from groceries to healthcare to domestic services to construction to landscaping.

Protesters shut down the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that a surge in immigrants since 2021 — including refugees, asylum seekers and others, legal and illegal — had lifted the U.S. economy “by filling otherwise vacant jobs,” as The Times reported, and “pumping millions of tax dollars into state, local and federal coffers.”

According to a seminal 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California, “many illegal immigrants pay Social Security and other taxes but do not collect benefits, and they are not eligible for many government services.”

In addition, the report said: “Political controversies aside, when illegal immigrants come, many U.S. employers are ready to hire them. The vast majority work. Estimates suggest that at least 75 percent of adult illegal immigrants are in the workforce.”

Trump can rail against the lunatic radical left for the scourge of illegal immigration, but the statement that “employers are ready to hire them” couldn’t be more true. And those employers stand on both sides of the political aisle, as do lawmakers who for decades have allowed the steady flow of workers to industries that would suffer without them.

On Sunday, I had to pick up a couple of items at the Home Depot on San Fernando Road in Glendale, where dozens of day laborers often gather in search of work. But there were only a couple of men out there, given recent headlines.

A shopper in the garden section said the report of federal troops marching on L.A. is “kind of ridiculous, right?” He said the characterization by Trump of “all these terrible people” and “gang members” on the loose was hard to square with the reality of day laborers all but begging for work.

I found one of them in a far corner of the Home Depot lot, behind a fence. He told me he was from Honduras and was afraid to risk arrest by looking for work at a time when battalions of masked troops were on the move, but he’s got a hungry family back home, including three kids. He said he was available for any kind of jobs, including painting, hauling and cleanup.

Two men in a pickup truck told me they were undocumented too and available for construction jobs of any type. They said they were from Puebla, Mexico, but there wasn’t enough work for them there.

I’ve been to Puebla, a city known for its roughly 300 churches. I was passing through about 20 years ago on my way to a small nearby town where almost everyone on the street was female.

Where were the men?

Protesters shut down the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

City workers repair broken windows at LAPD headquarters on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles on Monday.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

I was told by a city official that the local economy was all about corn, but local growers couldn’t compete with American farmers who had the benefit of federal subsidies. So the men had gone north for work.

Another reason people head north is to escape the violence wrought by cartels armed with American-made weapons, competing to serve the huge American appetite for drugs.

In these ways, and more, the flow of people across borders can be complicated. But generally speaking, it’s simply about survival. People move to escape poverty or danger. They move in search of something better for themselves, or to be more accurate about it, for their children.

The narratives of those journeys are woven into the fabric of Los Angeles. It’s part of what’s messy and splendid and complicated about this blended, imperfect corner of the world, where many of us know students or workers or families with temporary status, or none at all.

That’s why this overheated invasion looks so ugly and feels so personal.

We’re less suspicious of our neighbors and the people we encounter on our daily rounds than the hypocrites who would pardon insurrectionists, sow division and send an occupying army to haul away members of our community.

[email protected]

The Department of Homeland Security’s “sanctuary jurisdiction list” has more holes than the plot for the latest “Mission Impossible” film.

All you need to know about its accuracy is how my native Orange County fared.

The only O.C. city on the list is Huntington Beach — you know, the ‘burb with an all-Republican council that’s suing California for being a sanctuary state, declared itself a “non-sanctuary” community in January and and plans to place a plaque outside the city’s main library with an acrostic “MAGA” message.

Missing from the list? Santa Ana, long synonymous with undocumented immigrants, which declared itself a sanctuary city all the way back in 2016 and has a deportation defense fund for residents.

More laughable errors: Livingston, the first city in the Central Valley to declare itself a sanctuary for immigrants in 2017, isn’t on the list. Yet Santee in San Diego County, so notorious for its racism that people still call it “Klantee,” is.

There’s even Represa. Ever heard of it? Me, neither. Turns out it’s not a city but the name of the post office for two places not exactly known as sanctuaries: Folsom State Prison and California State Prison, Sacramento.

Within hours of his inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order tellingly titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” that, among other things, stated that sanctuary jurisdictions should no longer receive federal funds.

But the May 29 list laying out the jurisdictions that are supposedly subject to the penalty was so flawed that it was taken off the Homeland Security website within days. It’s still not back up. The effort seemed cobbled together by someone who typed “sanctuary” and a city’s name into Google and swallowed whatever the AI spat up without even bothering to cross-check with Wikipedia.

Trump’s opponents are already depicting this fiasco as emblematic of an administration that loves to shoot itself in the foot, then put the bloody foot in its mouth. But it’s even worse than that.

The list shows how blinded by fury the Trump administration is about illegal immigration. There is no mistake too big or too small for Trump to forgive, as long as it’s in the name of deportation and border walls. The president’s obsession with tying all of this country’s real and imagined ills to newcomers reminds me of Cato the Elder, the Roman Republic politician famous for allegedly saying “Carthage must be destroyed” at the end of all his speeches, no matter the topic.

That’s why the pushback by politicians against Homeland Security’s big, beautiful boo-boo has been quick — and hilarious.

Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns listens to speakers discuss the city’s plan to make Huntington Beach “a non-sanctuary city for illegal immigration” during a City Council meeting in January

(James Carbone)

Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns appeared on KCAL News to declare that Surf City’s inclusion was “pure negligence” while holding a small white bust of Donald Trump the way a toddler clings to its blankey.

Vista Mayor John Franklin, meanwhile, was on the city council that voted in 2018 to support the Trump administration’s unsuccessful lawsuit against California’s sanctuary state law. He told ABC 10News San Diego that he thought Vista made the list because “another city in the county that bears a similar name to ours … may have, and I haven’t confirmed it yet, adopted a sanctuary policy.”

Dude, say the city’s name: Chula Vista, a far cooler, muy Latino town closer to the U.S.-Mexico border than Vista is. It’s also on the list and isn’t a sanctuary city, either.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Rep. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) told the Voice of OC that he recently advised Santa Ana officials to “keep their head low” and not make a big deal about their sanctuary city status — as if hiding under a desk, like a “Scooby Doo” caper, will somehow save the city from the Trump administration’s haphazard hammer.

Immigration, more than any other part of Trump’s agenda, exemplifies the Silicon Valley cliché of moving fast and breaking things. His administration has deported people by mistake and given the middle finger to judges who order them brought back. Trump officials are now shipping immigrants to countries they have no ties to, and shrugging their shoulders. Immigration agents are trying to apprehend people in places long considered off-limits, like schools and places of worship.

And yet, this still isn’t enough for Trump.

Deportation rates are rising, but still not to the levels seen in some years of the Biden and Obama administrations, and not even close to Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower-era program that deported over a million Mexican nationals. Trump’s deportation dream team — Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, border czar Tom Homan and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — has berated ICE officials for not doing more to comply with Trump’s wishes.

The sanctuary list embodies all of this. Who cares if the wreckage involves human lives, or the Constitution? The sloppiness is the point. The cruelty is the point.

Homeland Security didn’t answer my request to explain the flaws in its sanctuary jurisdiction list and why it was taken down. Instead, a spokesperson emailed a statement saying “the list is being constantly reviewed and can be changed at any time and will be updated regularly.” The decision whether to include a place, the statement said, “is based on the evaluation of numerous factors.”

Except the truth, it seems.

Let’s laugh at the absurd mistakes while we can. Really, how pendejo can you be to think that Huntington Beach is friendly to undocumented immigrants but Santa Ana isn’t? Let’s laugh while we can, because things are going to get much worse before they get better.